Of Interest

To the extent that historians in 50 years comment on Adam Falk’s tenure, their discussion will focus on his decision to ban John Derbyshire from Williams and the larger debate over free speech on campus. (Key previous threads start here, here and here.) Let’s spend two weeks going through Falk’s two main discussions of this decision: his extended defense last year as published in the Chronicle of Higher Education and his Washington Postswan song. Day 9.

There are times when I’ve wondered whether we should treat these events as a type of performance rather than speech: If the World Wrestling Federation demanded to hold a cage match on the Berkeley campus, would the university be obligated to host it at public expense?

If When Brothers Speak demanded to hold a spoken word concert on the Berkeley campus, would the university be obligated to host it at public expense?

First, making fun of the enthusiasms of whites, especially poor, less educated whites, is OK, if you are Adam Falk. Making fun of the enthusiasms of African-Americans or Jews or just about any other group? Forget about it!

Second, is Falk so uneducated that he does not realize that this is a settled matter of Constitutional law, a non-problem that is easily handled hundreds of times each week in this great country of ours? Any public institution — whether it be the University of California or Margaret Lindley Park must operate in a viewpoint neutral manner. If you allow group A to hold an event of type X, then you must allow group B to hold an event of type X. You can have rules about X — nothing for profit, nothing loud, nothing with more than 100 attendees, whatever — but those rules must apply to everyone.

The incidents we’re being forced to contend with are far more pernicious and no less staged.

I suspect that Falk is not clear-eyed enough to understand exactly what his views imply. Can public institutions, like Margaret Lindley Park, bar “pernicious” events? Or only pernicious events that are “staged?” Who gets to decide? If that is the rule then, in addition to Nazi events, I would like to ban Communist events since Communists were responsible for at least as many innocent deaths in the 20th century as Nazis.

Nor should we be concerned solely with sensationalist speakers. Too many of our students and faculty are being threatened and harassed for expressing challenging points of view, especially about race. Their words are picked up by websites such as Campus Reform and The College Fix, amplified and distorted and shoveled into the Internet outrage machine.

Adam Falk is concerned with rudeness on the internet? Good luck! But it sure would be nice to see some concern for harassment directed at Williams students like Zach Wood. Adam Falk has not said one single word about that. As best we can tell, he only cares about threats and harassment from the right.

Related posts:

One Response to “Adam Falk’s Legacy, 9”

I was pleased to see that Falk mentioned Campus Reform and The College Fix. From Falk’s perspective, these websites have “threatened and harassed” students and faculty and are apparently as worthy of being banned as speakers like John Derbyshire.

I have friends at both websites. Both have carried stories regarding how I was mistreated as a 29 year-old conservative assistant professor of political science at Williams College in the 1980s.

From my perspective, Campus Reform and The College Fix are enormously important websites that help to right the scales and protect the interests of conservatives and Republicans who are subject to threats, harassment and mistreatment at the hands of the overwhelmingly left-wing students, professors and administrators.

The bottom line is that leftists like Adam Falk don’t want anyone to challenge them. They want to censor the right. They want to minimize the contributions of the right, crush it out, and remove it from our collective memory.

Thanks to the communications channels that Falk trivializes as the “Internet outrage machine” conservatives and Republicans like myself have a highly visible platform that allows them to fight back. I wish I had had access to such resources when I was a young assistant professor at Williams College.